Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital Delivers High-Quality Medical Services with Huawei OceanStor All-Flash Storage

Established in 1946, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (also known as the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences) is a modernized grade-A tertiary hospital (the highest level of hospital in China) with a full range of specialties, advanced technologies, and comprehensive medical teaching and research. As a landmark high-level hospital in Guangdong Province, the hospital is at the forefront of both international medical research and the realization of China's national strategic goals. With providing high-quality healthcare for people as the core, scientific and technological innovation as the driving force, and the three strategies of "discipline, platform, and talent" acting as guidance, the hospital continues on its journey to promote multi-disciplinary integration and comprehensive development of medical teaching and research.

Promoting Informatization to Achieve Smart Healthcare

The intelligent construction of Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital is centered on "informatization" and "big data application", and includes numerous projects and a wide range of service targets for which large investments have been made. The hospital has built computing power, network, and storage infrastructure to ensure the stable running of service systems such as the hospital information system (HIS), picture archiving and communication system (PACS), clinical information system (CIS), electronic medical record (EMR), and laboratory information system (LIS). On top of that, the hospital has built a 5G Internet hospital platform, which provides users with a wide range of services including online diagnosis and treatment, smart medical treatment, health applications, remote consultations, and science popularization and education through various applications such as WeChat and 5G messaging applets.

As Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital undergoes the process of transforming into a smart hospital, it has improved its medical service and scientific research capabilities and expanded its service scope. However, these have come at the cost of challenges such as more diversified and complex business requirements and the need to improve capabilities in order to offer better services. The hospital's legacy information technology architecture cannot meet the core requirements of smart healthcare. For this reason, the hospital urgently needs to upgrade its technologies to address pain points.

Following consultation and analysis of the existing informatization construction architecture, the hospital realized that the key to solving its challenges was to build a storage system featuring high reliability, performance, security, and efficiency.

Resolving Technical Problems with Huawei All-Flash Storage

Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital understands that data protection and excellent performance are the key requirements when it comes to the construction and upgrade of informatization architecture and, in order to achieve this, it is crucial to build a solid data storage foundation.

Following in-depth technical research and solution verification, the hospital chooses the Huawei OceanStor Dorado active-active storage solution to act as the foundation for its intelligent medical service platform. As a result, it has upgraded core service systems in the data center and improved the data read performance, reliability, and space utilization of core service systems.

The hospital has experience with using HDD + SSD hybrid flash storage on its core service systems such as the clinical data repository (CDR) and LIS. One of the major challenges that the hospital encountered when using such storage was that service may be interrupted during peak hours due to a large number of concurrent data access requests, which then leads to storage performance bottlenecks and latencies of 10 ms.

Following the adoption of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, system performance during peak hours saw the following improvements:

▪ The response speed of the CDR is improved by several times, no data access interruptions occur, system performance remains stable, and data read latency is less than 1 ms.

▪ The response speed of the LISAPP and LISDB systems is reduced to less than 1 ms, helping reduce the time it takes to generate medical testing results.

In the past, the HIS ran on a single storage device with gateways being required, resulting in a single point of failure (SPOF) bottleneck. In addition, only 15 minutes of data protection could be provided for CDR core data in the event of serious ransomware attacks, posing risks to data security.

At present, HIS services are carried by two active-active storage systems in two data centers. The two storage systems provide disaster recovery for each other without the need for additional gateways, thereby eliminating the SPOF bottleneck and greatly improving the reliability of HIS. In addition, Huawei's storage solution provides continuous data protection for CDR data with a snapshot period as short as 3 seconds.

The new storage system also reduces energy consumption and saves cabinet space by using only 36 NVMe SSDs and occupying 4 U of rack space, compared to the 136 SAS disks and 16 U of rack space of the legacy storage system, while also providing several times higher capacity and performance. This helps satisfy the hospital's storage requirements both at present while also leaving ample room for future capacity expansion. OceanStor Dorado's performance and capacity advantages are partly due to the nature of SSDs but are also due to Huawei's unique high-density design, which can simultaneously house controller enclosures, disk enclosures, and 36 SSDs in just 2 U of rack space.

With the successful adoption of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital has completely resolved the storage system pain points that have arisen in the face of new service requirements and built a next-generation core healthcare system featuring high efficiency, reliability, and performance.

Setting a Benchmark for Intelligent Transformation Innovation

Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital believes that intelligent medical construction is in reality the innovative integration of medical technologies with advanced infrastructure and application technologies. The hospital's successful medical system construction with all-flash storage demonstrates the successful combination of modern medical technologies with advanced storage technologies. Such integration not only accelerates the construction of intelligent hospitals but also serves as a benchmark for IT construction.

The development of intelligent medical diagnosis technologies based on the new paradigm of clinical epidemiology powered by big data, is an important step in Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital's blueprint for intelligent medical construction. Therefore, the hospital is considering building an intelligent medical data analysis platform, using emerging hierarchical storage technology to assist in the training and release of diagnosis models. In the future, Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital will pursue multidisciplinary technology integration and innovation, fully commit to promoting intelligent medical construction, and act as a benchmark for intelligent hospitals.